The rioters: Hey, they’re depraved on account they’re deprived

The New Neo Posted on by

This piece by Seumas Milne in the Guardian is typical of the way the left looks at the riots and their causes:

…[W]here exactly did the rioters get the idea that there is no higher value than acquiring individual wealth, or that branded goods are the route to identity and self-respect?

While bankers have publicly looted the country’s wealth and got away with it, it’s not hard to see why those who are locked out of the gravy train might think they were entitled to help themselves to a mobile phone. Some of the rioters make the connection explicitly. “The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters,” one told a reporter. Another explained to the BBC: “We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want.”

Most have no stake in a society which has shut them out or an economic model which has now run into the sand.

Reactions to the riots have highlighted some of the major differences between left and right. To the former, (a) the poor are never responsible, even for their own bad decision and actions; (b) the rich are always responsible, even for the bad actions of others; and (c) there is no problem that can’t be solved by more social services and/or income redistribution. The right, of course, has a very different idea of personal responsibility—to them, it’s actually personal—and believes the welfare state has been part of the problem, because it helps take away the idea of personal responsibility, dampens initiative, and leads to a sense of unjustified entitlement.

The argument makes me think of this number from the 50s, the song “Gee Officer Krupke” from the musical “West Side Story”. As I watch it now, these “juvenile delinquents” seem as archaic and outdated as the term itself, and nearly as tame as a bunch of Eagle Scouts. As they mock all the excuses made for them by supposedly well-meaning authorities, I note that there are fashions in these things: the bulk of the explanations back then had less to do with not enough money being spent on them and more to do with familial dysfunction, although the song does feature the famous line “Hey—I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!,” which pretty much summarizes Seumas Milne’s article:

Theodore Dalrymple offers a corrective to reasoning such as Milne’s. He even uses that word “deprived” [hat tip: commenter “Denise”]:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor””quite likely””any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

At the same time, his expensive education will have equipped him for nothing. His labor, even supposing that he were inclined to work, would not be worth its cost to any employer””partly because of the social charges necessary to keep others such as he in a state of permanent idleness, and partly because of his own characteristics.

[NOTE: Here are the original lyrics to the Officer Krupke song from the play, slightly different from those in the movie. Also, rumor has it that the song was originally supposed to end with “Fuck you!” rather than the rather tepid “Krup you!,” but it wasn’t allowed in those oh-so-innocent days.]

London, 1978

The New Neo Posted on by

Gerard Vanderleun offers some memories of London, then and now.

I’ve got my own memories—although, unlike Vanderleun, I never lived in London. The only time I’ve ever been there was a one-week stay in 1978, accompanied by my then-husband. It was summer, the weather was uncharacteristically warm and sunny, and the food was dreadful, just as I’d been warned.

Back then I was still dancing, and so some of my time in the city was spent in London’s ballet studios. That turns out to be a pretty good way of getting to know a city and its people—at least, its young and artsy people. I was surprised to learn that London’s dance studios were a mess.

Back then, no city I knew (and that included New York) had nice studios; most were in low-rent districts, consisting of a warren of rooms with obstructing posts. But London’s hit a new low of filth. The bathrooms were so disgusting, so full of mold and mildew, that taking a shower was out of the question. The toilet paper was inadequate to its task, more like low-grade wax paper than anything else. And the people seemed angry; testy and sullen.

This hostile affect was hardly limited to the dancers. I noticed it all over London that summer. The very first day my husband and I were there we observed a number of angry encounters between strangers, a phenomenon that became commonplace. And it wasn’t as though I was unfamiliar with big cities and their mores, either. After all, I had grown up in New York, and I’d lived in some of the major cities in the US.

But this seemed different, and it seemed specifically inter-ethnic. However, none of the people involved were white. It was immigrant groups that were clashing: Caribbean blacks vs. Arabs, Indians vs. Asians, you name it and the groups were angry at each other. It didn’t take the form of riots, of course. Rather, we observed screaming matches (and even pushing) over seemingly nothing. We came to expect at least one incident for every subway ride.

Now I look back and I see that as the beginning of something. The British were worn out themselves, their glory days over, but they were trying to absorb the aftermath of an empire that was no more, and immigrants from once far-flung shores and disparate cultures were rubbing up against each other and competing for scarce resources in a manner that boded ill.

How the present riots in England relate to all of this isn’t completely clear, but I think they do. However, a great deal more is going on now, including the effects of several more decades of the welfare state, the disarming of citizens, and a system of law and order that is overwhelmed by the nihilistic population it now faces—clearly, it’s not up to the task.

And I don’t think England will ever be the same again after this; its idea of itself will have been fundamentally changed.

[ADDENDUM: Ace has some chilling must-read stuff on the riots and people’s thwarted attempts to defend themselves:

“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named.

“But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police.

“We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights.

“I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses.

“We are being squeezed between the two.”]

Stock market’s down again…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and this time they say it’s about trouble with the French banks, which hold a lot of European debt.

My opinion? The market is very volatile, and each explanation is only part of the explanation. The fuller explanation is uncertainty and fear—some of it highly justified—breeding more uncertainty and fear.

I would not be surprised if the market went up again towards the end of the day. I would not be surprised if it plummeted further. No one should be surprised. I learned long ago to try to block out the ups and downs of the market, or they would drive me mad.

Unions try to buy Wisconsin back…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but fail. For now.

It was a squeaker, but this time the Republicans held on.

And the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel comes out with an editorial admitting that Governor Walker’s policies seem to have helped local Wisconsin governments financially, rather than hurt them. Fancy that:

So it turns out that the sky isn’t going to fall on all local governments in Wisconsin. The numbers now starting to come in show that Gov. Scott Walker’s “tools” for local governments apparently will help at least some of them deal with cuts in state aid imposed by the state budget.

That’s contrary to the expectation and the rhetoric of critics in the spring, and it’s to Walker’s credit. It bears out the governor’s assessment of his budget-repair bill, although we still maintain he could have reached his goals without dealing a body blow to public employee unions.

If the newspaper prints more of this kind of thing, Wisconsin Democrats’ bid to recall Walker might even fail too, just like this recall did.

What does it mean nationally? Maybe nothing. But it’s an indication that the swing in 2010 to the more conservative/Republican side in states such as Wisconsin may be holding, at least for now. And that although money can buy a lot in the voting arena, it can’t buy everything.

The plan for the attack on Romney

The New Neo Posted on by

This is news?

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

Naturally. And if so, no doubt the MSM will cooperate fully in disseminating the damaging information—the flip side of the coverup they performed on Obama’s dirty linen in 2008.

But the following quote amused me; don’t Obama’s campaign people realize who they’re also describing?

Obama officials have made “weirdness” an epithet for Romney the way they tagged John McCain “erratic” in the fall of 2008 after the Arizona senator suddenly left the campaign trail and nearly backed out of the first debate as part of an attempt to get a deal on the bailout…

“It’s not just a matter of dodging the debate, not just a matter of flip-flopping and putting his finger to the wind ”” it is that he’s not comfortable in his own skin, and that gives people a sense of unease,” added a Democratic consultant expected to be involved in the reelection campaign.

Obama and the debt/downgrade crisis: why should anyone be surprised?

The New Neo Posted on by

The debt crisis is not only a crisis for the country and the world, but for Barack Obama. I’ve noticed that he seems more tentative and cliche-ridden than ever, and that more and more of his erstwhile defenders are growing tired of his leaderless leadership. My sense is that he’s lost at least some of his boundless self-confidence; these events may have shaken him like nothing else in his life ever has before.

But I’m wondering why any of his supporters would be surprised at his passive behavior in the face of the growing crisis. After all, it is highly consistent with his words and actions (or rather, inaction) when the whole thing blew up back in the fall of 2008. Then he was Democratic-nominee Obama, and was widely lauded for his calm demeanor in the face of the financial crisis, especially as compared with what was seen as McCain’s noisy but impotent flailing.

This is what I noted at the time:

Obama is keeping mum on the details of what he thinks of all the financial plans swirling around lately, or what he would propose if he were President in these trying times.

If you’re already an Obama fan you probably think this is evidence of his lofty post-partisan superiority as well as his depth of thought. And perhaps it is. But this would be easier to believe if he didn’t have such a long history of protecting himself””and his status as a blank slate on which people can project their dreams””from commitment.

Obama has historically had two methods of accomplishing this. The first is taking so many stands that he can later claim he actually took the right one, and have the quotes to “prove” it. The second is similar to what he’s doing now: generalized platitudes and then silence on the specific issues (or, in the Illinois Senate, voting “present”). Obama has made a career out of being either a shifting target or a vaporous one.

Procrastination such as this is not such a stupid move in the strategic sense. Get your enemies to commit, criticize what they say, and see how the wind is blowing before you take your stand. Better yet, maybe you’ll never have to take a position, because events have a way of moving along and people have a way of forgetting once a new issue rears its head.

It may even be an excellent tactic to win an election””and in this case Obama assumes he has the advantage in any downtown in the economy, before he even opens his mouth. So, why ruin a good bad thing?

But an election is just the first step; after the inauguration, Presidents have to lead.

Fast forward to now. Dana Milbank observes:

A familiar air of indecision preceded President Obama’s pep talk to the nation…The most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency…

Various reporters tried to elicit more information [from Jay Carney after the President’s speech] about Obama’s economic plans and deficit-reduction proposals, but Carney declined again to take the lead.

“I don’t want to get too far ahead of the process,” he explained to the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler, adding that Obama “will be contributing to that process, not driving it or directing it.”

“Why?” inquired Politico’s Glenn Thrush. “He’s the leader of the free world. Why isn’t he leading this process?”

That is the enduring mystery of Obama’s presidency.

I beg to differ with Milbank. It is not a mystery, it is a character trait, one Obama has had all his life. Those who didn’t see it before weren’t looking.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, things fall apart—the London riots

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was talking with friend, comparing the present feeling of unrest to the turmoil of the late 60s. We agreed that both times were tumultuous, but she thought things were worse now. I said I wasn’t sure; maybe they were just different. Remember the assassinations and the cities burning with riots and racial tension? Much of the time it seemed like a major conflagration was imminent, although this turned out to not be true.

As you might imagine, we never resolved the issue. But I thought of the conversation again when I read about the riots in London.

Everyone is trying to figure them out. Are they racially-inspired, class-inspired, or just an eclectic bunch of destructive and marauding youths having a fine old time?

The rioters aren’t telling. The original riots began as an outgrowth of peaceful protests in Tottenham, a neighborhood in which 29-year-old Mark Duggan had been killed by police, but they escalated to seemingly random violence in Tottenham and many other areas around the city, in a bunch of copycat actions that appear to have been helped by coordination through social media.

But the fact that no one knows why this is happening doesn’t stop the left from analyzing the psyches of the rioters and telling us what’s really bothering them. Mary Riddell, for example, says it’s not a race thing:

The second alleged culprit is ethnicity. But, as David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP, has said, these are no race riots. The Eighties uprisings at Broadwater Farm, as in Toxteth and Brixton, were products, in part, of a poisonous racism absent in today’s Tottenham, where the Chinese grocery, the Turkish store and the African hairdresser’s sit side by side.

Perhaps that’s true; many have pointed out the diverse nature of the neighborhoods involved and of the rioters, although this writer draws attention to a history of racial unrest among Tottenham’s “Afro-Caribbean population.” Like many on the left, Riddell is blaming income inequality; the following statement—especially the phrase “creamed off”—expresses her assumption (typically shared by the left) that income is a zero sum game:

In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then

Then there’s this by Nina Power, who mentions “the division between the entitled and the dispossessed.” “Dispossessed,” of course, implies that members of the underclass have had what should have rightfully been theirs confiscated by others. Her solution: Britain isn’t leftist enough; more income redistribution is needed.

Of course, as is so often the case with urban riots, the perpetrators aren’t doing what you think they’d do if Power’s thesis (protesting income inequality) were correct—although I suppose that stealing and looting is a crude form of income redistribution. But these “youths” are burning their own neighborhoods, which is so often the modus operandi for riots.

To many, these riots appear to be an expression of nothing more or less than lawlessness and mob vandalism. Labour MP Diane Abbott—who happens to be black, and who therefore might have more dispensation to tell the truth—called it this way:

Cuts don’t turn you into a thief. What we saw was people thieving for hours. Mr Umunna [another black Labour MP] said the violence in London was “totally opportunistic and utterly unacceptable.”

Although opportunistic, the rioters are quite organized all the same, getting in touch with each other by Blackberry and Twitter, and wearing masks to protect themselves from being identified later:

A…tweet said “come we go rob Mare Street Primark” while another said: “JD Spots [sic] Mare Street giving away tracksuits. Help your self..”

One user of the microblogging site wrote: “Chaos on Mare Street: police stand by doing nothing, whilst ”˜protesters’ steal from local shops. You should both be ashamed of yourselves.”

It’s not clear whether those police standing by are armed or not; some London police do bear arms, as the original provocation of the Duggan shooting demonstrates. But although firing on a crowd would be a shocking and extreme act (although some people in the comments section of British newspapers are angry enough at what’s occurring to advocate it), what’s wrong with tear gas or other similar crowd control techniques?

This article describes the police as powerless and outnumbered:

Many of the areas targeted last night seemed to have little police presence. But the violence and looting thrived even where riot officers were deployed as police appeared largely outnumbered and powerless to act…

Residents accused the police of abandoning them. Matthew Yeoland, 43, a teacher from Peckham, where property was set ablaze, said: “It’s like a war zone and the police weren’t doing anything. There were too many people and not enough police.”

The riots are so widespread that the police seem overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. Whether their hands are also tied by policy restrictions, or inadequate training, or both, is unclear from reports I’ve read. What is clear is that their response has failed to get the violence under any sort of control, and that law-abiding citizens are furious:

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, heard during a visit to Tottenham that locals felt police had deserted them. “There was nobody there to protect us,” one resident told him…

Police have already admitted that they had no choice but to allow looters to steal from high street shops on Saturday evening as they had to focus their attention on the dozens of burning buildings and rioting in Tottenham.

Former Met commanders said the riots were unprecedented in their sporadic and spontaneous nature.

Brian Paddick, the former deputy assistant police commissioner who was a sergeant during the Brixton riots in the 1980s said: “We have not faced this situation before.”

The general sense is of thing falling apart, the center not holding. I’m quoting the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats, which I’ve quoted many times before here. It seems especially apropos now, so here’s the whole thing—again:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[ADDENDUM: They’re considering employing water cannons to subdue the crowds. But the London police are not trained in their use.]

[ADDENDUM II: This sort of thing reminds me of the following:

[ADDENDUM III: As always, Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club has much of interest to say.]

Did S&P make an error (redux)?

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you may be heartily sick of this question. I certainly am. I’ve written enough about it, and I’m not planning to write about it again—unless, of course, some important new facts or revelations come into play. And those of you who don’t want to read another word about it can just skip this post.

But you gluttons for punishment may be interested in perusing a post by Eric Erikson of Red State (hardly a guy to be accused of naivete, pulling his punches, or lack of conservative bona fides) that pretty much lines up with what I’ve been saying, although he adds quite a bit. I have no idea who his sources are or how reliable, so make of it what you will.

And there’s more in the same vein from Allahpundit at Hot Air.

Nina Simone interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe we all could use a musical interlude right about now.

A happy one might be nice. But I’ve been thinking for quite some time of putting something up that features Nina Simone, a singer/pianist whose music I’ve loved since my high school years. And Ms. Simone was not usually a happy camper.

By all accounts, Simone was a troubled person. I saw her in concert a couple of times, and the last time (during the late 70s??) she expressed so much anger that the audience became visibly uneasy.

But what a musical genius she was! Trained as a classical pianist, but thwarted (she believed by racism) in her desire to make that her profession, she became one of the premier interpreters of jazz and pop classics, giving them a unique spin with her wonderful pianistic technique and her low and intensely expressive voice.

These two YouTube videos were recorded during a performance in London in 1985 at a venue called Ronnie Scott’s (recording available here). The night was hot (literally; Simone is sweating bullets). But there is something so raw and vulnerable in her manner that she makes it seem as though the audience is eavesdropping on the most intimate and private outpourings of her wounded heart:

Simone’s daughter, who is also a singer, said of her mother in an interview: “She was a genius, and most geniuses in history are not happy-go-lucky people. Their lives are tragic, but yet they’ve left their mark in history, and they have a gift, and there’s a lot of torment that goes along with that.”

I salute Simone’s gift.

Down and down the Dow goes, where it stops…

The New Neo Posted on by

…nobody knows.

Right now, in a move that should surprise absolutely no one, the market is down significantly (as of this writing, 325). A great deal of the slide is almost certainly a reaction to late Friday’s S&P downgrade of the US debt. Will the market continue a downslide, or has there been enough of a correction? Your guess is as good as mine, and as good as S&P’s—which probably isn’t very good.

On Saturday I wrote a post about the downgrade that engendered some of the most vociferous criticism ever in the comments section. I see no reason, however, to change my mind, although of course reasonable people may differ (here is a statistical analysis of S&P’s abysmal track record at forecasting, if you’re interested in that subject).

But it’s not about S&P anymore, if indeed it ever was. They’re a player in the game, of course, but the important question is how bad will the repercussions be. There are no answers, but here are my thoughts:

—This cannot help but have a negative effect economically in the short run. It could be small or it could be big, but some of the effect depends on how panicked people become. Fear may not be the only thing we have to fear, but it is something that feeds on itself and tends to exacerbate the downturn, sometimes a great deal.

—If you’re looking at the political repercussions—yes, this hurts Obama, who is rightly seen by both sides as a non-leader. But if you think it automatically helps the Tea Party, I believe you’re wrong, because (as I said on Saturday) the S&P statement could just as easily be seen as an argument to raise taxes, as well as a criticism of the Tea Party’s “brinksmanship” (S&P’s word, not mine).

—Here’s the good news, though: it could be the wake-up call for Congress to actually do something effective about the long-term debt. I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till that happens, though.